Archive for July, 2012

Saw these two kids emptying their haul of crab by the ferry building and thought it was a kodak moment. There were a bunch more crabs on the cement before I took this picture, as I was told they needed to be four inches in length to keep, which more than half weren’t. One of the kids was wearing white socks and flip flops. About one mile away the Giants were about to play the Mets. This is crabbing in San Francisco.

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Using up half a bar of wax on a new board is a nice feeling. Took my Sperm Whale out at Ocean Beach this past weekend in waist high chop. Kinda perfect waves for the board. It was a ton of fun. Ciji took some pics on her phone (her real camera was dead). I added some filters.

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Saw this importantly awesome rap song/video on Mission Mission today, which brings much needed awareness around the horrors of shark finning and our movie-driven fear and hatred for sharks in general.

“I don’t mean to bite a surfer, I’m just an underwater predator just trying to do my thing.” That’s my favorite line from the song. I’ve been surfing Ocean Beach for the past 9 years without a siting, but I’ve heard TONS of stories about dangerous toothy animals in the water. Go figure.

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Got myself a Sperm Whale. It’s a fun looking board designed by Dane Reynolds, shaped by Channel Islands. I rode my bike down to the beach on Saturday and picked it up from Wise. Had a nice conversation about funky shaped boards with the guy who works there, but the wind that day stopped me from trying the board out.

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Handplanes are all over my favorite surf blogs right now, including the Tubes. I’ve been seeing them so often I just couldn’t resist trying to shape one myself. Being a man of many on-going art projects, I had an extra piece of rough cut western red cedar in my bedroom waiting to become a handplane.

A handplane is just like a mini surfboard. Just no fins, right? That’s how I looked at this project. Draw a template like you were making a surfboard for your hand.

I channeled out the bottom to make up for the lack of fins, and finished the handplane by applying wood stain and tung oil. We’re calling this model the “Lonely Clam.”

Now I can’t say exactly what a “good” handplane feels like or how it should handle in the water, but I got in a sunset body surf session with the Lonely Clam yesterday and had a blast. Without question, you’re gonna enjoy body surfing a lot more with a hand plane.

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Haight street has a lot of homeless. The upper Haight, where Haight street meets Golden Gate Park, tends to have the heaviest congregation of people living on the street – offering easy access to the park and a steady stream of tourists to panhandle. Directly across from this location is a fast food restaurant.

The parking lot of that fast food restaurant was a prime location for people who live on the street to sleep. It offered a small area of wood chip covered ground in between zipcars and neighboring houses. Until recently, (I guess a couple month back) the wood chips have been replaced, and boulders along with large pointy plants were added.

According to an SFGate article, this particular fast food place has a not so good history when it comes to homeless relations. In 2010 it was accused of raising the cost of items on its low priced menu to “reduce the numbers of poor and homeless people visiting the fast food chain restaurant.”

Given that, and the fact that I don’t know too many fast food places that care about what the outside of their buildings look like, it’s hard to imagine the rocks and prickly plants are simply part of a beautification effort.

But who knows, maybe it is just an attempt to make a parking lot look better.

In any case, we will now return to our regularly scheduled programing of surfboards and animated gifs.

Not only is this paper poster super cute, it’s 100% accurate in its depiction of my favorite San Francisco neighborhood. It’s not widely known, but there are only 10 houses in all of Frederick Knob, and French designer, Chloé Fleury, captured each one beautifully.

The evidence is stacking up; a nod on Google maps and now a paper model poster… Do I have any choice but to start a hyperlocal Frederick Knob community site?